Numerous departments, agencies
and organizations acting on behalf of Canada’s government were deeply involved
in planning, conducting and covering up the 2004 regime change that overthrew
the elected government of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide.1

One government entity in
particular, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played a key
role in this illegal, coup d’etat process. For instance, CIDA funnelled $23
million to Haiti’s notorious Group of 184 (G184) and 10 of its anti-Aristide
member organizations.2 The G184 coalition was led by Haiti’s corporate elite,
including those later identified by Haiti’s rebel leaders as having financed and
armed their violent attacks in early 2004. (See
p.14-15.)

Prior to the coup, CIDA’s
"development" strategy in Haiti was to impose an aid embargo on Aristide’s
government while simultaneously "investing" heavily in the G184 and other
organizations engaged in the struggle to depose Aristide. This manipulative plan
to destabilize Haiti’s legal government, was part of a successful effort to
ultimately wrest control of that country’s political power structures.

Change Drivers, NGOs and QGOs

A CIDA report on Haiti in 2004,
called "Reflecting on a Decade of ‘Difficult Partnership,’" described the
Agency’s approach and explained some of the key "lessons learned from Canada’s
experience" in that country, including the need to:

"Focus investments on
opportunities for change by identifying a change driver (issue or
sector with broad support), engaging a coalition of key players and
providing sufficient resources."3

CIDA’s strategy created a
tragedy for Haiti’s impoverished masses. The whole raison d’etre of CIDA’s "coalition
of key players"—the G184—was to organize and lead a stridently partisan,
political campaign to denounce, undermine, destabilize and ultimately overthrow
Aristide’s Lavalas party government. Thanks to "sufficient resources"
from CIDA and its equivalents in the U.S. and French governments—as well as
support from Haiti’s corporate oligarchy—Haitian "change drivers" successfully
helped rid Haiti of President Aristide before the end of his five year term.

Sadly and most ironically,
CIDA’s strategy was carried out by Québec-based organizations that are widely
respected by many progressives as promoters of peace, democracy, human rights
and "Third World" development.

Just as CIDA had selected
suitable Haitian "change drivers" to conduct the Canadian government’s political
operations there, it also contracted support from agencies and organizations in
Canada. It is only logical that for this important domestic assistance, CIDA
turned to entities that depend upon government funding.

Not only then did CIDA use its
Canadian "partners" to channel money to political agents of influence in Haiti,
it also used its financial clout to recruit support from Canadian organizations
that are perceived to be independent from the government. These so-called
"non-governmental organizations" (NGOs) not only facilitated the government’s
engagement in Haiti, they also did some of the government’s public relations
(PR) work about Haiti in Canada. As such, these "NGOs" might more accurately be
described as quasi-governmental organizations (QGOs).

Once Haiti’s brutal regime
change was underway, in March 2004, several of these CIDA-funded QGOs began to
lend their considerable resources, organizational expertise and public
credibility, to the cause of building acceptance and support for the handpicked
dictatorship that supplanted Aristide’s elected government. This was no small
order. It was, in short, a linguistic makeover designed to mask Canadian
complicity in a vicious, illegal regime change and to give it the appearance of
a beneficial, Third World development program promoting peace and human rights.

The Other Sponsorship Scandal

Oddly enough, the timing of
Haiti’s coup coincided exactly with the Liberal’s "sponsorship scandal" that
flared up on February 10, 2004. At that moment, U.S.-backed Haitian rebels were
just beginning their onslaught against Haiti’s government. Their paramilitary
violence ultimately provided the threat used by U.S. marines and diplomats to
kidnap and exile President Aristide. This rebel "uprising" also served as the
necessary pretext for calling in U.S.-led multinational forces (including
Canada’s JTF2) to "stabilize" the country, and impose a hand-picked, unelected
regime upon the people of Haiti.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, the
sponsorship scandal caught fire when the Auditor General’s annual report
revealed that the Liberal government had funneled $100 million in federal PR
contracts to its friends in Quebec advertising firms. This closely parallels how
the Liberal government poured millions into Quebec development agencies that
aided and abetted Haiti’s violent coup and then ran PR efforts to cover the
debacle as if it were a transition to peace and democracy.

A link between these two PR
operations can also be found in the person of Denis Coderre, the Liberal MP
(Bourassa, QC) who became Prime Minister Paul Martin’s "Special Advisor on
Haiti." In this position, Coderre was the government’s top apologist for
Canada’s role in ousting Aristide and for channelling some $200 million to prop
up the coup-installed dictatorship of Haiti’s de facto Prime Minister, Gerard
Latortue. Coderre appears to have already been well practised in the art of
political sycophancy. He had previously been the vice president of Public
Relations for a Liberal PR firm in Montréal called Le Groupe Polygone Editeurs,
Inc., which cashed almost $40 million in government cheques for PR contracts
between 1997 and 2003. This made Polygone "the biggest recipient of federal
sponsorship cash."4 The utter fabrication of events to promote the Canadian
government was not beyond the scope of Polygone’s abilities. For instance, in
2000, it received $330,000 for advertising the federal government at a Quebec
hunting and fishing show that never happened.5

Similarly, Coderre led the
charge in fabricating totally illusory victories for Haitian human rights and
democracy. Amazingly, although thousands were killed, Canada’s role in aiding,
abetting and disguising the coup was done so cleverly that it never became a
public scandal.

In the process of cheerleading
the Canadian government’s complicity in Haiti’s regime change, CIDA-funded QGOs
in Canada have consistently downplayed, rationalized or completely ignored—and
hence covered up—widespread systemic human rights abuses that were committed by
the coup-installed dictatorship and its proxies within paramilitary forces, the
police, the prison and legal systems. This whitewash was also extended to
conceal serious violations by UN-sanctioned troops that have occupied Haiti ever
since, waging counter-insurgency operations to quell opposition to the illegal
change in government that was forced on Haiti.

This so-called UN "peacekeeping"
mission has been fraught with failure and scandals because Aristide was and
still remains the most popular, democratically-elected president in Haiti’s
history. Aristide was still immensely popular among Haiti’s desperately poor
population in early 2004 when thousands of elected officials— from municipal
councillors right up to national cabinet ministers—were forced out of office.
Haiti’s democracy was replaced by an unelected regime that oversaw the
execution, imprisonment and exile of thousands of citizens who dared to support
the government they had duly elected. The result was a human rights catastrophe
that lasted more than two years.

The Invisible Coup

Despite all this, the coup
process was hailed, by its domestic and foreign backers alike, as a great
victory for the democratic process. As explained by Professor Peter Hallward, a
Canadian professor in England and author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the
Politics of Containment:

"[T]he forced removal of
Aristide’s government in February 2004 was probably the most spectacular
success of a U.S. administration that is not likely to be remembered for the
brilliance of its foreign policy. Arguably, the long effort to contain,
discredit and then overthrow Lavalas in the first years of the twenty-first
century constitutes the most successful exercise of neo-imperial sabotage
since the toppling of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1990. In many ways it was
much more successful, at least in the short-term, than previous imperial
triumphs in Iraq (2003), Panama (1989), Grenada (1983), Chile (1973), the
Congo (1960), Guatemala (1954) or Iran (1953).... Not only did the coup of
2004 topple one of the most popular governments in Latin America but it
managed to topple it in a manner that wasn’t widely criticised or even
recognised as a coup at all."6 (Emphasis added)

The U.S., Canadian and French
bureaucrats who first conspired at a government resort on Meech Lake, near
Ottawa, to lay the groundwork for Haiti’s 2004 coup were only successful because
they controlled a legion of agents to carry out the operation. They employed not
only those in military uniforms but others clad in the garbs of diplomats,
business entrepreneurs, "civil society" leaders and aid workers. People employed
in each of these sectors worked hard over several years to ensure the final
success of the mission.

Compartmentalized into a various
political, diplomatic, economic, security and propaganda duties, these
governmental and QGO agents partnered with a similarly diverse range of
collaborators in Haiti. However, focused as they all were on their own specific
covert and overt tasks, they did not realise how their own specific
responsibilities figured into the whole, regime-change operation. This carefully
constructed organizational strategy creates a division of labour that separates
large operations into isolated working units that are unaware of each others’
activities. This means that the overall perspective of the project and its
purpose, can remain hidden from all but a few of the key individuals involved.
This method has long been used by military and intelligence agencies to serve
the interests of corporate elites. It is important because many individuals
would not participate if they knew what they were contributing to.

This means that those employed
by CIDA-funded QGOs in Canada are probably still not even aware that they were
used to facilitate a coup d’état. The directors, staff and volunteers within
these organizations are no doubt sincere in their belief that by helping oppose
Aristide’s government they were working in the best interests of Haiti’s
population. These well-meaning Canadians either had no idea of the links between
their Haitian "partners" and the rapacious corporate elites of that country (and
their own), or they perhaps harboured some naive faith that these elites are a
benevolent force striving to promote peace and alleviate poverty.

The QGO–Government Convergence

It may appear that once QGOs
accept government funding, their employees then begin to align their views,
efforts and reports to match the policies of their financial taskmasters.
However, such analysis is too simple to explain the convergence between a
government and those it hires to do its work. Governments prefer to award
contracts to those whose policies are already in tune with its own. Those
receiving such contracts are recruited onto the government’s team because they
share basic underlying values, approaches and beliefs, especially with regards
to the task at hand.

Besides the government’s
briefing and debriefing sessions before and after deployment to the field, CIDA-funded
aid workers are embedded within carefully-selected Haitian partner groups. And,
it is not by some coincidence that the the Haitians chosen to "partner" with
CIDA and its QGOs are so vehemently anti-Aristide. Canada’s CIDA-funded QGOs did
not team up with any of the hundreds of Haitian groups that actively supported
their elected government.

The impact of such close working
partnerships on the political attitudes and biases of Canadians thus placed in
Haiti should not be underestimated. Upon arrival in Haiti and for the duration
of their visits, aid workers easily become dependent upon their in-country
partners. As these activists, organizers and supporters of the anti-Aristide
movement become the guides and the main interpreters of complex political,
social and cultural realities in which these Canadians are suddenly dropped,
they inevitably gain tremendous influence over their guests’ understandings of
the country. This mechanism of influence is essential in explaining why CIDA-funded,
Canadian QGOs embraced the campaign to depose Aristide and then promoted the
Canadian government’s support for the coup-empowered regime that followed.

Peter Hallward cites a women’s
rights activist in Haiti who noted "a form of class rivalry" between
organizations there. He explains that

Haiti’s elite NGOs include, most
notably, organizations such as CONAP, CRESFED, ENFOFANM, G184, MPP, NCHR, PAPDA
and SOFA. These groups received millions in CIDA funding and are closely tied to
Canadian QGOs.8

Canadians partnered and embedded
in these anti-Aristide organizations are led to believe that they represent the
best interests of Haiti’s destitute masses. However, Tom Reeves—a retired U.S.
professor of Caribbean studies who has participated in numerous human rights
delegations to Haiti since 1991—states that these groups, "based on their record
and the evidence of their growing lack of connection to the base," "do not
represent the poor people of Haiti."9

Another key to understanding how
some Canadian aid workers could be indoctrinated into the Haitian elite’s
worldview is the anti-Aristide media. Two daily newspapers and many large radio
stations belong to the National Association of Haitian Media (ANMH), an
important member of the G184. Several ANMH moguls—who were on the G184
executive—are still waging a veritable class war against the poor who had
empowered Aristide’s democratic rise to power. (See pp.26-33
and pp.34-37.)
ANMH was instrumental in spreading outrageous lies fabricated by the CIDA-funded
NCHR, to frame Aristide allies for crimes they did not commit. (pp.34-37.)

Canadian workers with CIDA-linked
QGOs were directly exposed to this propaganda. More importantly though, they
were also open to influence from their Haitian partners who were bombarded by
ANMH’s relentless propaganda campaigns. Also, because Haiti’s anti-Aristide
media had a tremendous impact upon foreign coverage of Haiti’s coup and its
aftermath, Canadian aid workers continued to receive the same sort of biased
news and disinformation, even after their return home.

Having largely been exposed to
only one, extremely biased side of the story in Haiti, many CIDA-funded workers
may still be largely unaware of the detailed information contained in this and
the two previous Haiti-focused issues of Press for Conversion! Anything
that we can do to inform them of this research would be useful.

It is of great importance that
activists in Canada’s peace, development and human rights movements understand
how it is that well-meaning, progressive people can be co-opted into
implementing such horrific policies as those coordinated by the Canadian
government in Haiti. This was not the first time that Canadian organizations
were used—in the name of social progress—to conduct regressive government
policies against poor populations. The residential school system is but one
historic case in point. Let us hope that it will not take 100 years for Canada’s
government, and its QGOs, to admit recent mistakes in Haiti. The information and
analysis in these pages are a resource tool for activists trying to prevent
similar disasters from happening again.